


I Found My Friend in the Wilderness (He Was Not Ready For Me)

by Katowisp



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), civil war - Fandom
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Hurt Steve, Hurt Steve Rogers, Tony Stark Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 01:47:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6780304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katowisp/pseuds/Katowisp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve wasn't a liar. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>SPOILERS for Winter Soldier</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Found My Friend in the Wilderness (He Was Not Ready For Me)

They spent months going through all the old Hydra hideouts. For reasons Steve wasn’t exactly clear on, Hydra had tended towards Artic locations. He was spending more time in the frozen tundra than he had any real desire to do (and, to be honest, if he’d never stepped out onto a barren field of snow again, he would have been happy.) and the irony was not lost on him.

“I’m not complaining,” Sam complained, “but did Hydra have something against temperate zones? I mean—wouldn’t Ohio have made a good safe house location?”

“It’s _Ohio_ ,” Natasha replied, glancing at Steve as she continued pulling ancient hard drives and tapes from their frozen mausoleums. “That’s a hell all of its own.” She stood up, the canvas bag sagging. “But anyway, old USSR locations have a certain anonymity that appealed to Hydra, I’m sure.”

Hydra was utilitarian in their architecture, and one building looked just like the other. Natasha called it cookie cutter, and Sam had hummed in agreement. Even if Steve hadn’t heard the phrase before, he had figured out the meaning. He’d gotten tired of telling everyone he didn’t understand a reference. It made him feel dumb, and he had gotten tired of the twinkle in Tony’s eye every time a new, unknown reference was made.

And there had been so many. 

So he’d stopped asking. 

“Anyway,” Natasha pulled her shoulders back. She tended to slouch under the weight of the equipment, and Steve had seen her consciously pull her shoulders back more than once. “Knowing how deep the rabbit hole goes, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were Hydra safe houses in Ohio, too. There was one in New Jersey.”

“Zola,” Sam remembered. 

“You’d think he would’ve known well enough to stay dead,” Natasha griped mildly. 

They headed to Kyshtym next, and Nat carried a Geiger counter the entire time. She’d told them about the explosion in 1957, a result of a failed cooling system from a plutonium production site. The Russians had hit it by declaring the area a Reserve, but the CIA had known about the accident from the beginning. S.H.I.E.L.D had known about the underground bunker Hydra had kept there. 

The strangest thing about going through the old records was finding journal entries made by Peggy, or finding her notations made in the margins. Her longhand was as crisp and refined as she had been, and although Steve hadn’t known much about her writing outside of her signature, he’d come to find he craved finding notes from her. He liked to imagine what she had been doing when she’d been writing—some of the entries were clearly rushed. Was she between missions? Some were nearly illegible—long and scrawling--was she falling asleep after a hard day of work, and just trying to get her thoughts down? 

He couldn’t reconcile her with the old woman that was too often bedbound. Her mind was as sharp as ever, and Steve could see the woman he had loved under the life she had lived. 

But the woman he had known had been so vivacious, and she had expended all that energy in the seventy years he was gone. So, he tried to fill the gaps with the old reels and her journal entries. To find where the ends met. 

“Think we got them all?” Sam asked in Vozrozhdeniya, deep in the Aral sea. The last of the anthrax sites were supposed to have been decontaminated in 2002, but Natasha had insisted on HAZMAT suits anyway. She was paranoid like that, but Steve figured she wouldn’t still be alive if she weren’t. 

“I don’t know,” Steve ran his hands over the tapes. Aralsk-7, the main laboratory under the Soviet Union’s Microbiological Warfare Group had fallen in November 1991. Not long before the video Zola had showed them. 

December 17, 1991. 

Steve hadn’t connected the dots, but Natasha had. When Zola had implied Hydra was responsible behind Howard Stark’s death, she’d done some digging. She’d dropped a file on Steve’s desk. It was all in Russian, but he understood the pictures, if not the words. 

“Bucky,” he had said.

“The Winter Soldier. That wasn’t your friend.” She had replied.

So they’d recruited Sam (I’m free, he promised.) and traveled the world looking for old stockpiles of footage. Steve didn’t know what to do. His conscience told him he had to tell Tony, but he didn’t think the billionaire would understand that the man who had killed his parents had not been (was not) in control of his body. The world had seen shaky iPhone videos record the same man try to kill Captain America. 

In Skrunda, Natasha cornered Steve in the old control room. He could feel the heat of her body against his. He flexed his hand, resisting the urge to put it on her hip. He didn’t understand the signals she was sending. He didn’t know if she was so casual around him because she trusted him implicitly, or because she wanted something more. He was afraid he was missing the most obvious of signals; that something would happen to one of them, and she would be his next Peggy. 

“We won’t get all of the videos,” she told him quietly, Sam puttering around in the room next to theirs. Steve had only made the most oblique references to what they were doing, and why. Sam hadn’t asked for more, and it made Steve’s deceit feel even worse. Natasha had convinced him it was best for Sam, and she was probably right. But Steve had never seen himself a duplicitous person, and having to lie to both Sam and Tony about who had killed Howard and Maria bothered him deeply. 

( _You’re not lying to Tony, Natasha had said, You’re just not bringing it up._ )

“—but I think we’re reaching zero sum. Steve, are you listening?”

“We can’t hide the truth from Tony forever.” Natasha was fractured but her imperfections, hidden under stoicism and professionalism, made her beautiful. Steve wasn’t sure his heart was prepared for another woman. 

“He won’t look for it,” she promised. 

Steve wasn’t sure he agreed, but he didn’t know how to broach the subject with Tony. “Hey Stark, remember your parents? My best friend killed them.” 

When they got back to one of their safe houses just outside of Missoula, Montana, they watched the video. Even if his best friend was a stranger as the Winter Soldier, even if he’d had an idea of what was on the tape, it sent a chill down his spine to see it happen. The tape was degraded from the years. It was in black and white, and there was no sound; like some aberration of the films he’d watched as a kid. 

He couldn’t help the gasp that escaped his lips as he watched his friend (the Winter Soldier was not his friend (he was the only friend he’d ever truly known)) murder Tony’s parents in a coldblooded execution. “We can’t show this to Tony,” Steve said aloud. He felt Natasha’s eyes on him. 

Steve had heard the death rattle in his mother’s chest. The breath hadn’t come easily, and he’d tried to pace his breathing with hers. It had made him light-headed, and panicked, and he knew she wasn’t getting enough air into her lungs to last the night. A doctor had explained later that the death rattle was nothing more than those close to death losing their ability to swallow, and trying to breathe past the secretions in their throats. 

She died from pneumonia. She drowned to death on dry land. She had never been at sea. (She had always wanted to go sailing.) 

“A son should never have to see his mother die.” He explained, when he could bear the weight of her gaze no longer. 

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

“No, _did you know?_ ” Tony stabbed his finger at Steve. It would be easy to lie. He’d kept the secret safe for this long. But what good was the lie now? Steve had hoped Tony would never find out the truth; was sure it was only a matter of time before he learned of Steve’s part. 

“Yes.”

He didn’t try to defend the first blow. He deserved it. After the third one, instinct kicked in. His body was already working furiously to knit together some of the broken bones he’d sustained, and he knew he was fighting a punctured lung from the way his breath caught in his chest. He didn’t want to fight Tony at all. 

But he recognized the hate in Tony’s eyes, and knew his friend didn’t see Steve. He wasn’t fighting because he blamed Steve—not really. It was twenty-five years of regrets of unspoken words and missed Mother’s Days and empty Christmases. It was the anger of a young man who had lost his parents too soon, just when he was starting to appreciate them as people. 

Steve knew all this, but he also knew Tony would kill him, if he could. The Winter Soldier was not Bucky Barnes. The man fighting him was not Tony Stark, teammate and friend. 

The Winter Soldier and this man would kill him, but Steve Rogers was not ready to die. 

The blow to Tony’s arc reactor was almost too much. Steve felt cold when he saw the crack in the blue casing, his hands numb. When Tony didn’t move for a moment, Steve felt his heart skip, and that was weird. His heart, pulsing in his head and with the multiple wounds he’d sustained, just didn’t beat at all. For a split second, he stopped bleeding. He was free of pain. 

But Tony reached a hand to his chest, and Steve’s heart and breath came back. 

He didn’t know what to say; how to say he was sorry for what had happened to Tony’s parents, or that he was sorry Tony had been a typical angsty teen and had said things he didn’t mean to parents he was sure he was going to see again. He didn’t know how to explain that Bucky was not only his friend, but now also his only living tie to the past; the only thing that existed in this strange world that had also existed in his. (The one where they both belonged.) He had just lost Peggy. He wasn’t prepared to lose Bucky, too. 

So he said nothing, and picked his friend off the ground. 

At Tony’s behest, he left the shield. Not because Tony was right, but because he was not sure he could carry the mantle of Captain American anymore. He had failed his friends. He had lied to them, and divided them. The people that had believed in him most were caged.

They were all worse off than they had been before. 

He could not wear the mantle of Captain America, because he no longer deserved it.

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a rough draft I wanted to get out before I got into a 24 hour shift. I promise to come back and clean it up some. 
> 
> Just stretching my writing muscles some.


End file.
